HAMILTON, Ohio — Jacob Welch is looking for his shoes. The sparkly ones. He turns over a suitcase in his basement and unzips it, throwing out a pair of pink boots before grabbing a box of jewelry.
The 29-year-old is late.
At first, he picks earrings that don’t match. Then, he grabs four pairs of tights. That’s how many he needs to hold the breast plates and butt pads in his dress.
“This is the roughest my makeup has looked in a while,” Welch said. “I fully had a mustache an hour-and-a-half ago.”
We go behind-the-scenes of a local drag controversy in the video below:
His basement is also his dressing room. And I’m here because of an online controversy sparked by Welch's appearance at a coffee shop in West Chester.
In drag, Welch performs as Roxie D. Mocracy. And this afternoon, he’s getting ready to drive to Coterie Lounge and Café. Last month, Welch went there to read books to about a dozen children.
“Drag queen story hour is essentially just a fun thing to take your kids to,” Welch said. “Just like the museum or the park.”
A former Lakota school board member, who was voted out of office by her colleagues, called the event “disgusting” and accused the cafe of grooming children in a post on Facebook.
Coterie’s owner, Ghiovanna Dennis, said she got emails from people who said they were watching her. And before the April event, she called the police because she was worried about protesters.
But the event went off without a hitch. Now, another one is scheduled in June, as well as a drag show at the coffee shop on May 30.
Dennis tells me her business has never been busier.
"I wanted to create a place where everybody could be exactly who they were when they walked through the doors," Dennis said. “And without this, I would have never known the support that I have."
At Coterie, Welch asks for a “caramelly iced thing” and laughs. When we first start talking, he downplays the drag story time's importance. And then he tells me his own story.
“When I was in middle school, I had a plan to kill myself,” Welch said. “A week before I was going to commit that plan, my parents told me my brother was gay.”
And when his parents told him, they didn’t say his brother was in trouble.
“I didn’t kill myself,” said Welch. “The drag queen story hour could be — for some kid — the conversation my parents had with me.”
